Stephen: So we continue with the
Stephen: the eightfold path we're now on
Stephen: in the reconfigured version, step 7
Stephen: work. But before getting into that I'd just like to sort of take a step back
Stephen: and consider
Stephen: the Afol path in terms of the overall teaching of of Gautama of the Buddha.
Stephen: the eightfold path.
Stephen: one could fairly say.
Stephen: is the alpha and the Omega of the Dharma
Stephen: beginning and the end.
Stephen: And I mean that quite literally.
Stephen: the the first words of the first discourse
Stephen: begin, because I have found a middle way. And what is that middle way? It is the noble eightfold park.
Stephen: But the very first thing, he says.
Stephen: and then some 45 years later. But as he's lying on his deathbed between 2
Stephen: salt trees
Stephen: in a forest in Kosinara, Koshinagar.
Stephen: one final disciple shows up.
Stephen: and Arnander, the attendant, says.
Stephen: you know he's not. He's he's about to die, you know. Just leave him alone. And Baltimore overhears this, he says, no, send him to him.
Stephen: and so he receives this fellow.
Stephen: It was named for the moment I temporarily forget.
Stephen: and it receives him into the order. and then
Stephen: this fellow asks a final question before he leaves, and he says, Look, when you're no longer with us.
Stephen: how will we know whether
Stephen: teaching is yours or not. I mean what will identify.
Stephen: How can we trust someone who says, I'm teaching what the Buddha taught?
Stephen: How will we know. and he said.
Stephen: as long as that teaching contains the noble afoot path you can consider it as my done.
Stephen: And then a day or so later, he dies.
Stephen: So it's the beginning and the end.
Stephen: And this leads me to make with some confidence the assumption that the terms the 8 words
Stephen: that he uses to designate the 8 steps of this path
Stephen: probably go back to the beginning, probably go back to him.
Stephen: They weren't invented, Leighton modified.
Stephen: I think we can trust.
Stephen: These 8 key terms
Stephen: are foundational.
Stephen: Now, as we saw
Stephen: Buddhist tradition doesn't always stick with what the words.
Stephen: you know, you know, literally made. We saw, for example, how
Stephen: Sankapa has come to mean for many Buddhists, at least today is something like intention. whereas if you go back to the word itself. you find that it means something more like
Stephen: imagination. At least I would argue that
Stephen: another term which is perhaps even more
Stephen: puzzling
Stephen: is the word Carmanta
Stephen: KA. M-a-n-t a Carmanta.
Stephen: And this is invariably translated as action.
Stephen: So you get
Stephen: right? View right? Thought, right speech.
Stephen: right livelihood, right action.
Stephen: Now, of course, action is simply in Pali or Sanskrit. Karma.
Stephen: Karma just means action in all contexts.
Stephen: I've yet to see a book on Buddhism that queries the fact. The the Buddha doesn't use the word action.
Stephen: He doesn't talk about Sama Kama. He talks about summer Kamanta.
Stephen: Different word.
Stephen: So what does command to mean?
Stephen: Well. easy way to find out.
Stephen: Pick up the Pally Text Society Pali to English Dictionary and look.
Stephen: and it gives 2 in the first meaning it gives for commander is work, employment, business.
Stephen: and then the second meaning. It says, moral action.
Stephen: in other words, how it has come to be understood.
Stephen: But the the primary meaning is work, action, business employment.
Stephen: So something fishy is going on in my mind.
Stephen: So let's just try to break down the word, Carmanta.
Stephen: It's a compound of 2 words comma, which means action. and anter hunter's. One of these words, that is very. very, very common.
Stephen: very central in Pali and Sanskrit, difficult to translate.
Stephen: Unter literally means something like a limit or a horizon
border
Stephen: or an end.
Stephen: something that circumscribes or encloses something
Stephen: it's often used negatively like, for example.
Stephen: when the Buddha speaks of the middle way. He says it avoids the 2 unta
Stephen: usually mistranslated as extreme. It actually means something more like a dead end
Stephen: somewhere that. blocks or
Stephen: doesn't really. It's a path that doesn't go anywhere.
Stephen: There's a limit. There's a horizon. There's a boundary.
Stephen: Kamanta, therefore, means something like the scope of your activity, the extent of your activity, the sphere within which your activity
is focused.
Stephen: We might think of it as
Stephen: the answer to the question you would
Stephen: often meet on social occasions, I'm sure, when you got to know each other on this retreat, for example, one of the first questions is, what do you do?
Stephen: Oh, what do you do
Stephen: now? Of course the question is just about doing action. but the answer you give is not
Stephen: well. In the morning. I you know I get up and I have a shower, and I brush my teeth. I make my breakfast, and I take the kids to school.
Stephen: you know. That's strictly, you know. Lit, if you took the word literally. Yeah, that is what you do.
Stephen: But you make a very clear distinction between those activities which really are a matter of how you get through the day, how you survive.
Stephen: As we spoke yesterday.
Stephen: as opposed to what you do.
Stephen: and when you answer that question, you
Stephen: I would suggest, at least in in a group like this.
Stephen: is, you say
Stephen: I work as a doctor.
Stephen: I'm a teacher, or I'm a therapist.
Stephen: or I'm an academic. or I'm a writer.
Stephen: In other words, you name
Stephen: what you would otherwise call your work
Stephen: as opposed to simply your activities.
Stephen: And if we go back to
Stephen: a very famous passage
Stephen: in the in the Pali sootas, it's probably a passage that is very early, because it's it's it's suitably quirky. It's a story I'm sure most of you are familiar with. When the Buddha's recounting something that happened to him when he was a child.
Stephen: We don't know how old, but I imagine him to be a teenager, maybe. and he says, he says, as I was sitting beneath a rose apple tree.
Stephen: While my father was at his commander.
Stephen: was at his work.
Stephen: I entered into a state of meditation which he then describes as the first John. and this is
Stephen: understood as his first. So it's sort of awareness that there's another possibility of
Stephen: other kinds of consciousness, of being in the world that opened up to him in that moment in his childhood. But his father was at his commander
Stephen: and clearly commander. Here
Stephen: means work. It doesn't mean, as most Buddhist traditions describe
Stephen: right action as not killing, not stealing, not
Stephen: sexually abusing anyone.
Stephen: It wasn't, though. His father was taking a break from murder, pillage, and rape.
Stephen: It means his father was doing his job. And again, we don't know what that job was. Usually it's thought of. It was probably in the fields because he was sitting under a tree.
Stephen: Who knows but the point is, there's plenty
Stephen: of evidence to show.
Stephen: The commander doesn't mean just action, as in right action commander means work.
Stephen: Okay? Why? Why have we lost what appears to be the original meaning of the term. and substitute it with something pretty general and vague.
Stephen: I would argue as I did argue with other. with the structure of the eightfold path culminating in spiritual activities, mindfulness and samadhi.
Stephen: The reason why work is not
Stephen: understood here is because monks don't work.
Stephen: and monks and nuns are presented
Stephen: in Buddhist tradition as the as those who exemplify the practice of the Dharma and its totality. If anybody practices the noble eightfold path.
Stephen: Well. a monk would say. then it's us. We're the model. We're the role. Model.
Stephen: But unfortunately, one of the things that is characteristic of monastic life is you don't have a job. That's exactly what you leave behind. You don't have a career. You don't have an employment. You don't have a business.
Stephen: All you have
Stephen: is a means of survival
Stephen: which is begging. So Arg. Yes. clearly. survival
Stephen: monks have their means of survival.
Stephen: hyper simplicity.
Stephen: and and
Stephen: the ability to live that way because others are willing and able to provide you with.
Stephen: so if we follow this
Stephen: subversive line of thought.
Stephen: it gives rise to the idea
Stephen: that originally, perhaps.
Stephen: this eightfold path was not
Stephen: presented as a way of life for renunciate monastics.
Stephen: but it was presented as a way of life for people who work.
Stephen: And
Stephen: it's striking also, when when you read the Sutras. the the Buddha gives great respect, and often draws
Stephen: on as an example for his teaching
Stephen: the work of artisans.
Stephen: The sootters are full of metaphors from artisans.
Stephen: Archer, a
Stephen: arrow makers, Fletcher's
Stephen: carpenters, goldsmiths, goldsmiths in particular.
Stephen: So much so. I wonder whether the Buddha's father might have been a goldsmith? The but Buddha knows an awful lot about gold.
Stephen: anyway, who knows? And also this also fits rather well with the eightfold path.
Stephen: being the path that leads to the restoration of a city
Stephen: rather than the ending of suffering.
Stephen: It all kind of hangs together.
Stephen: We also know. And I've written about this in confession of a Buddhist atheist
Stephen: that after the Buddha died. There was a power struggle
Stephen: between Cussapa, who was a very grim, ascetic.
Stephen: somewhat self-important monk. and Armando.
Stephen: who was the nice guy.
Stephen: the Buddha's intermediary with the world
Stephen: and preserved in the Sutras in the Casapa Sanita.
Stephen: You have the story of what happened
Stephen: between Arnande and Casper in the time between the Buddha's death.
Stephen: and the and the convening of the first council which
Stephen: gossiper controlled. And one of the episodes is that Arnande goes off for a walk
Stephen: with a number of his followers during this period, and he goes to a place called the Southern Hill.
Stephen: and while he's at the southern hills. many of his followers, his monk followers returned to the Leila.
Stephen: Then he comes back to Rajagah.
Stephen: and Casipper immediately summons him.
Stephen: and he says, What do you think you're up to? You don't know your measure.
Stephen: You went off to these hills, and everybody left the monastic order. What's all that about?
Stephen: He's constantly berating on. And
Stephen: and then, a few days later. No, not a few days later.
Stephen: after the end of the first council.
Stephen: another guy shows up a guy called Purana. who we don't otherwise hear about.
Stephen: and Purana is described as coming from the same place, the southern hills. We don't know where that is.
Stephen: the southern hills. and and Purana is told
Stephen: by the monks. Okay, we've had this council. We've decided what the Buddha said. From now on you must follow that
Stephen: that body of text. What we have set in stone, as it were. and Purana says. no way. he says, I'll only
Stephen: practice those teachings. I have heard from the Buddha's mouth himself.
Stephen: So something was going on. And it's quite remarkable, in a way that these exchanges have been preserved. because, at least from our secular point of view, they don't make.
Stephen: They don't reveal
Stephen: cussopper. And these senior monks in a terribly positive light.
Stephen: So
Stephen: that's the the basis on which I will interpret action as work.
Stephen: and again inject
Stephen: quite a strong element of secularity
Stephen: into this path.
Stephen: But there's another consequence, too. in this rereading. because if Commenta is work. then what is argiv survival. Normally, survival
Stephen: is translated as right livelihood, and it tends to and it's described usually as avoiding certain kinds of work that cause harm.
Stephen: You mustn't trade in poisons, or trade in slaves.
Stephen: or run brothels,
Stephen: weapons, all that kind of stuff.
Stephen: So the 2 get blurred
Stephen: in the same way. In fact, as Hannah Arendt points out, labour and work get kind of mixed up.
Stephen: and she teases them apart, too.
Stephen: So, in other words, she's actually addressing a very similar problem.
Stephen: the difference between what you do to survive and your work. And if you want to read more about that, read her book. the Human condition.
Stephen: So
Stephen: this points out. if I'm correct.
Stephen: that the Buddha made a distinction between what you do in order to survive
Stephen: and your work.
Stephen: Now, of course, ideally.
Stephen: your work
Stephen: should be that which also enables you to survive.
Stephen: And what most of us in the in our kind of societies are.
Stephen: you know, aim for is to find work that is meaningful. satisfying, fulfilling.
Stephen: and at the same time we get paid for it. We can pay the bills and send the kids send the kids to college. And so
Stephen: but of course we know very well, and this is much
Stephen: understood by artists, for example, and writers.
Stephen: people who
Stephen: have a vocation to make art or write novels, but
Stephen: they can't live from it. They have to go, and.
Stephen: you know. become, you know, teach English at high school, or whatever it might be.
Stephen: And I think that's a very, very
Stephen: important and crucial distinction in our own lives to differentiate between what we do
Stephen: to survive. And there's a lot of stuff we do to survive that is not meaningful. unfulfilling. Even if we do have a a work that we really love.
Stephen: There's all sorts of chores and tedious things
Stephen: that we have to. you know, get on with.
Stephen: and this by making that distinction we also open up, I think.
Stephen: a way to start thinking more effectively and meaningfully about
Stephen: the the work and survival being core elements of our practice.
Stephen: because every step of the eightfold path is something that is to be
Stephen: brought into being. It is to be Barva nud.
Stephen: It's not just meditation, and
Stephen: so forth, that we cultivate, but we cultivate
Stephen: ourselves through our work.
Stephen: and I know in my case, and possibly for many of you. one of the most meaningful and satisfying and important
Stephen: parts of our life is our work is not not a chore might be sometimes.
Stephen: but it's actually what we find very fulfilling.
Stephen: in other words, that the work is not something you do, and then you go and practice the dharma, and you meditate and go on retreats.
Stephen: Your work is your practice.
Stephen: so
Stephen: let's start by looking at how Hannah Areant
Stephen: defines work as opposed to labour.
Stephen: Work, she says, is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence. which is not
Stephen: like labour survival embedded in the species ever-recurring life cycle.
Stephen: So, in other words, labour. manual labour, unskilled labour is basically
Stephen: built into the sustaining of life, and that's pretty much all it does. It's embedded in the recurring life cycle, which, although she's probably not aware of it.
Stephen: evokes for us the idea of, sang San. It's going round and round every day is pretty much the same.
Stephen: You eat, you work in order to be able to eat enough and support your family. So you have the energy to be able to start work again the next day, and it just goes on and on, and on, round and round and round.
Stephen: whereas work, she says.
Stephen: in distinction to labour.
Stephen: provides an artificial
Stephen: in inverted commas world of things.
Stephen: She she then calls this the human artifice.
Stephen: The human artifice is what human beings make
Stephen: through their work, not through their labor.
Stephen: And this artifice, this world, this city, let's say, is distinctly different from all natural surroundings.
Stephen: and within its borders of this artifice individual life is housed
Stephen: while this world is meant. while this world, this artifice.
Stephen: is meant to outlast
Stephen: and transcend all the individuals who ever live in it.
Stephen: So, in other words, we, as human beings, we construct civilizations.
Stephen: And they can be enormously varied, and I don't just mean modern civilizations.
Stephen: we know the more that we know about the prehistorical period. People were creating complex societies.
Stephen: They may not have had skyscrapers and and motorways.
Stephen: Nonetheless, they created structures
Stephen: that
Stephen: survived over generations that were not just
Stephen: things that had to be done in order to get through the day
Stephen: something survived, whether they they be the the dreamings of the aboriginals. For example.
Stephen: these stories, these myths, these metaphors, these ways of life.
Stephen: And then she says, the human condition of work is worldliness.
Stephen: and that's why I've chosen to call it the worldly eightfold path.
Stephen: It's a condition in which we construct a world
Stephen: and a rent distinguishes then between
Stephen: what she calls the animal laborans. the laboring animal whose sole asset basically is their body, their physical strength.
Stephen: and Homo Faber in Latin.
Stephen: the human being who fabricates things
Stephen: with his or her hand
Stephen: and brains. And my
Stephen: and again, that resonates very much with the distinction Gautama makes between
Stephen: agricultural labour
Stephen: and the skill of the artisan.
Stephen: the goldsmiths of Fletcher, and so on.
Stephen: So over time. What happened as I've mentioned is the Buddhist tradition began to blur this distinction between labor and work. The monk renounced both.
Stephen: and just survive by arms.
Stephen: but it seems that quite clearly labour or survival and commander or work are 2 separate spheres in the Buddha's mind.
Stephen: And it's through our work. not just our labour that human beings
Stephen: construct durable buildings, roads, institutions, technologies, cities
Stephen: that are able to withstand the entropy of the natural world.
Stephen: And again, I think one of the reasons that we treasure ancient artefacts, be they the the Pyramids, or the the Buddhist caves.
Stephen: temples in India? paintings on cave walls.
Stephen: The reason, I think one of the reasons we value those things is because we admire that human capacity to conceive of and erect
Stephen: edifices.
works
Stephen: that resist the impermanence inherent in natural processes.
Stephen: and even Buddhists. who. who, constantly
Stephen: hammering on about the impermanence of all conditioned things.
Stephen: nonetheless go to great lengths
Stephen: to build institutions
Stephen: and temples, and so on. that will try not to succumb, to change.
Stephen: Go to a place like Borobudur in Indonesia.
or Uncle Watt, or any of these places.
Stephen: Eventually they start to fall apart.
Stephen: But nowadays Unesco comes along and fixes them.
Stephen: but just because something will be eventually subsumed by the earth from which it came, that's no reason not to build it. In the first place.
Stephen: so the most important part of the human artifice
Stephen: this is, Arent, speaking, is to offer mortals a dwelling place more permanent and stable than themselves.
Stephen: and it's only in such a kind of an enduring space
Stephen: that someone like Gautima or Socrates, or Confucius or Jesus was able to emerge as an exemplar
Stephen: of what a human life
could be.
Stephen: He also extends the idea of work
Stephen: from the the outer world, the creating of A,
Stephen: of artifacts, of buildings and
Stephen: art and culture, and so on, and legal systems. and he uses it as a metaphor
Stephen: for the training of the self.
Stephen: for what
Stephen: goes on inside our souls.
Stephen: I cited that verse yesterday or the day before, where
Stephen: he says that the wise person
Stephen: tames the self, or trains the self in the same way that a Fletcher
Stephen: puts together an arrow
or
Stephen: a carpenter shapes a piece of wood.
Stephen: so he extends the metaphor of work
Stephen: into the work we do on ourselves.
Stephen: and it's no accident. I think, that
Stephen: Psychotherapists.
Stephen: spiritual teachers.
Stephen: shamans
Stephen: quite naturally employ this word work. We work on ourselves.
Stephen: We don't labor on ourselves, we work on ourselves. In other words, we.
Stephen: we construct, we build, we reshape, we, we refine our own inner life.
Stephen: and that's, of course.
Stephen: essentially an ethical process. We are, as it were, sculpting
character
Stephen: of the kind of person we aspire to be. And that's not something you just kind of pay lip service to
Stephen: from a dharmic perspective.
Stephen: It has to do with a conscious training
Stephen: and practice
Stephen: with the raw materials of your own feelings, emotions, mental states, consciousness
Stephen: think. Another point we have to emphasize. Here, too.
Stephen: is that
Stephen: The fourth task, which is that of cultivating the eightfold path
Stephen: extends the very concept of what we mean by
status.
Stephen: And it's here I find that so a term like engaged Buddhism problematic
Stephen: because it seems to make engagement or work. or doing something in the world as a kind of optional extra.
Stephen: The real practice is what you do in your spiritual life.
Stephen: I think what's going on here, and it seems to me quite clear.
Stephen: particularly when we
Stephen: think of the eightfold path as both
Stephen: contemplative life and active live.
Stephen: Is that
Stephen: the practice extends equally to both.
Stephen: So engaged, Buddhism is actually tacitly acknowledging that Buddhism has somehow lost sight of the engagement that was originally there.
Stephen: and turned it into a spiritual religion. largely the preserve of celibate monastics
Stephen: priests.
Stephen: So a secular dumb
Stephen: is one that seeks to restore
Stephen: the practice. The very notion of practice to encompass the whole of our human life. and we don't make a distinction.
Stephen: So when somebody says, What's your practice? Is often
Stephen: happens in Buddhist circles.
Stephen: Nat, you quite naturally find yourself naming some kind of spiritual exercise.
Stephen: I practiced Vipassana I didn't used to. I started out as a Tibetan Buddhist, and we did, Tantra. But now I do, Vipassana, it's really good, and I'm really interested in Zen. That's what the practice is.
Stephen: And I suspect all of us have observed that kind of languaging within ourselves. I've certainly seen it in myself. but I think really the
Stephen: key shift from an orthodox traditional idea of the Dharma
Stephen: to a secular one is to restore the notion of practice to everything we do.
Stephen: But there's a shadow side to this.
Stephen: because in its
Stephen: in constructing an enduring world
Stephen: through our work.
Stephen: civilizations, cultures, and so on.
Stephen: This almost inevitably entails acts of violence against nature.
Stephen: particularly
Stephen: in this in historical time.
Stephen: And that's perhaps a characteristic of history is that our worlds are built from basically ripping the natural world apart
Stephen: to acquire the resources needed to build buildings. we need to smelt ore for iron. We chopped down trees and forests for wood.
Stephen: We burn coal and oil for heat and electricity.
Stephen: So today the Homo Faber, the
Stephen: the fabricating human being is no longer an artisan who turns clay on a wheel.
Stephen: you know, makes beautiful
Stephen: jewelry out of gold. but the homophobia has become the architect who constructs schools and hospitals, the technician who launches satellites into space.
Stephen: the manufacturer
Stephen: who builds container ships and aeroplanes and
Stephen: computers and robots and guns and cruise missiles.
Stephen: And so with the advent of industrial technology and the mechanisation of the labour process. the peasant farmer now becomes basically the factory worker.
Stephen: a cog in the machine
Stephen: of producing consumer goods in factories.
Stephen: and the artisan has now evolved to become the engineer.
Stephen: You know who designs and and maintains this complex
Stephen: technological machinery.
Stephen: So in building our world.
Stephen: particularly in the last.
Stephen: since the Industrial Revolution, basically
Stephen: with
Stephen: wreaked havoc
Stephen: on the natural world. And again, I don't have to tell you that
Stephen: it's self-evident.
Stephen: And as Heidegger and others and her rent have pointed out the technological mindset has
Stephen: the technological thinking or framing of our workers now
Stephen: also extended into our own inner processes.
Stephen: You know, meditation is seen as a technique, too, solving a problem
Stephen: so
Stephen: as much as we admire the artifacts of antiquity.
Stephen: we have to recognise that their successor
Stephen: is modern industrial technology.
Stephen: which is arguably slipping out of our control.
Stephen: And it's in the construction of this world
Stephen: that the accelerating numbers of human beings have come to threaten the survival of numerous non-human species
Stephen: with which we share this planet.
Stephen: again, I did a bit of reading and research into this. It's estimated that
Stephen: 37,000 species are currently at risk of extinction. As a direct result of human activity.
Stephen: I mean, that is a massive genocidal
Stephen: consequence
Stephen: of our work.
Stephen: of our civilizations.
Stephen: and we all enjoy the fruits of that civilization. We're all complicit
Stephen: unavoidably.
Stephen: And even in 1 58,
Stephen: when Arant wrote
Stephen: the human condition. she already feared
Stephen: that within a century she predicted.
Stephen: future man
Stephen: would come to exchange the natural world
Stephen: for something he has made himself.
Stephen: And she considered the question as to what kind of future
Stephen: humankind wishes to create on earth to be
Stephen: a political question of the first order.
Stephen: which can hardly quote, be left to the decision of professional scientists.
Professional
Stephen: politicians!
Stephen: Again that echoes what
Stephen: Winton was saying the other day
Stephen: a political question of the first order. I think we recognize that now more and more clearly.
Stephen: So what does this
Stephen: in. How does the Dharma respond to this? What? How would we respond to this from a dharmic perspective
Stephen: if we honor the fundamental?
Stephen: You know, bases of the eightfold path.
Stephen: then. that
Stephen: in a way
Stephen: acknowledges the value of work. To become fully human. to flourish is done
Stephen: through finding meaningful work.
Stephen: That part of our practice is about
Stephen: being able to survive on this earth
Stephen: in a way that does not cause its destruction.
Stephen: And as we saw yesterday, this in terms of survival. This has very much to do with learning to distinguish between our wants and our needs.
Stephen: How can we be content with our housing, our food. our clothing.
Stephen: and other things that we might now consider to be.
Stephen: you know, necessary for a flourishing human life. Education.
Stephen: We've mentioned justice.
Stephen: healthcare. wi-fi.
Stephen: or however we, wherever we draw that line.
Stephen: When we bring work into this equation.
Stephen: this seventh step of the path there we really are concerned with the with the political matches?
Stephen: How do we create and construct a world
Stephen: that does not lead to the mass extinctions of other forms of life? How do we construct a world that is
Stephen: in harmony
Stephen: with the natural processes of
Stephen: of the of the environment. Obviously
Stephen: the seas and the forests. the earth itself, the atmosphere.
Stephen: So I think what we're going through now at our particular moment in history. A
Stephen: is a point at which we, if we do not figure out
Stephen: how to
Stephen: create a human artifice in arrest terms, in other words. a human environment, a human world
Stephen: that allows and respects and honors
Stephen: the needs of other species.
Stephen: the needs of those who are very often reduced to lives of
Stephen: relatively, you know, grinding.
Stephen: often meaningless labour.
Stephen: and all of these touch on the points that Winton's raised
Stephen: ecolod arch, logical degeneration and destruction. increasing injustices.
Stephen: increasing division between the rich and the poor.
Stephen: All of these elements come into this reflection into this consideration
Stephen: so hopefully, therefore. by recovering
Stephen: what seem to me to be core elements of the Dharma, we get a much more robust framework of practice that can
Stephen: that could go beyond the division between my spiritual life and my engaged life.
Stephen: It all becomes part of a single practice
Stephen: of what we call the eightfold path.
Stephen: the alpha and the omega
Stephen: of the Dharma itself.
Stephen: So I'll stop there.
Stephen: Let's have a 5 min break, and we'll
Stephen: So we now have about 50 min for reflection, discussion comments
Stephen: and on screen, obviously as well. I where do we begin?
Stephen: someone else decide the sequence. Guy, who put their hand up first.
Stephen: okay, Margaret. what about Margaret?
Stephen: Margaret? Okay.
Audience.
thank you. Everyone.
Stephen: Yeah.
Stephen: Stephen. I wonder if you would tease out for us a bit the meaning and translation of
Stephen: because
Stephen: it qualifies everything and the traditional
Stephen: right.
Stephen: Everything kind of presupposes an authority to decide what's right and wrong for me. So that's number one.
Stephen: I think the summer question is a red herring.
Stephen: It goes without saying in the context of these values that we're concerned with how to do these things in a way that's in accordance with our values and
Stephen: with the rest of the dharma.
Stephen: We don't have to belabor this with this summer, and the fact that summer appears under everyone.
Stephen: You know some of this, some of that. and the fact that this is translated as right.
that
Stephen: the word doesn't. I mean the word can mean right if you wish, but literally the word Samar means complete
Stephen: like they use this expression, Samasam Buddha.
Stephen: a completely awakened one. not a rightly awakened one. It it has to do somehow has to do with a with wholeness.
Stephen: But my hunch
Stephen: is that
Stephen: originally the word summer might have been used with regard to the first
Stephen: perspective. right view usually mistranslated
Stephen: a complete perspective online. And
Stephen: the
Stephen: what's interesting if you look at through the Suttas. There's only
Stephen: there is a discourse called the Summer Ditty Suta, which I referred to earlier.
Stephen: There's no other discourse called the Summer Sunkapa, or the summer voucher, or the summer Kuranta.
Stephen: So it looks to me as though summer was just kind of added on
Stephen: to sort of flag. The fact that this is the right kind of summer, the right kind of this, but that's very much in the interest of an orthodoxy. Who wants to impose a particular view.
Stephen: it's also striking that.
Stephen: apart from
Stephen: perspective or view and mindfulness or subtit.
Stephen: you do not have. You do not find
Stephen: Sutter's discourses that are dedicated to the other 6 elements of the path. There's no discourse on.
Stephen: Write speech, for example, or write intention, or write, or however you translate it.
Stephen: so it looks as though
Stephen: the elements of of view which has became effectively. You know, doctrine, orthodoxy, and sati mindfulness which became
Stephen: the basic meditation practice.
Stephen: there may have been earlier on. We don't know
Stephen: discourses that address each of these areas.
Stephen: but I would leave, as you've noticed in my configuration. I don't bother with the word summer. I take that for Grant that we're not interested in how to do these things badly.
Stephen: That seems beside the point. You also get a problem like summer samadhi. Right? So what would if if there's a right concentration, what's wrong concentration?
Stephen: It doesn't really make a lot of sense. And there's very. There's virtually no discussion of the the opposites of the the wrong versions thereof.
Stephen: So again, I think a lot of this this secularizing approach is about clearing away the dead matter.
Stephen: the dross that's built up over the centuries just getting back to the core ideas and starting afresh
Stephen: next question. huh?
Stephen: I wonder why Sealer's not here on the list?
Stephen: Mean? I know you included moral action in work. But why is Silla Celer not here? Given that
Stephen: Essex is so important.
Stephen: Well, Celera, I think, means really morality.
Stephen: not ethics.
Stephen: although it's often translated as ethics. Because, again, there's this general blurring of the difference between morality and ethics in English.
Stephen: The other thing is that sealer is not always framed positively.
Stephen: if you
Stephen: the person who enters the eightfold path is known as a stream enterer.
Stephen: In one of the classic definitions of a stream enter, 3 things fall away. 3 fetters are lost.
Stephen: The first one is basically something like narcissism. self view.
Stephen: It doesn't actually use the word self. It's sakaya ditty. It's difficult to translate. It means the view of the entire body literally
Stephen: so a kind of, I think, an obsession with
Stephen: with self. What Lenoris speaks about is cell thing if you wish.
Stephen: The next one is usually translated as attachment to rites and rituals.
Stephen: But that's not what the text says, either. The text says, Sila, butter paramasa sila bata celer
Stephen: right. and butter
Stephen: is an ancient Indian word. That means like rules regulations.
Stephen: and I understand that to mean moral rules. and you could either interpret it. And again, the texts, they get different versions in the early discourses.
Stephen: But what falls away when you enter the stream is attachment to moral rules.
Stephen: we might even say attachment to morality as opposed to ethics.
Stephen: and even Bickubodey, who's pretty conservative. He translates sealer as virtues and vows.
Stephen: which is, I wouldn't quite agree with that, but he recognizes that it's not ethics
Stephen: or morale. Yeah, it's not ethics, really.
Stephen: but in some of the early texts they don't even say, attachment to
Stephen: is sila butter. Moral rules fall away, and this is in accordance with another phrase
Stephen: that the Buddha uses to describe a person who has entered the stream, and that is, that the person becomes ha parapachaya, independent of others
Stephen: in the practice, in other words, entering the stream.
Stephen: entering the eightfold path is The moment at which you acquire
Stephen: autonomy in your practice.
Stephen: You're no longer dependent upon others to tell you what to do. You've found the guiding principles you've internalized them, and now you engage with the world effectively in the light of your own
Stephen: compassion
Stephen: and love and wisdom.
Stephen: and you steer your own course through life. You become
Stephen: independent in that way, and that also breaks down the idea that you are beholden to following a certain moral regime
Stephen: in a strict of precepts and rules. You know they are broad guidelines, perhaps.
Stephen: but they're not sort of set in stone.
Stephen: You negotiate your way through the world in terms of what the situation calls for, not what the rule book says.
Stephen: Thank you.
Stephen: Okay. Libby at the back there?
Hmm.
Stephen: yes, thank you. One of the things that's really troubled me since I first read your your book after Buddhism.
Stephen: and which you also mentioned again this morning, is that the Buddha, at the time of his death, was was totally or virtually alone, except for Ananda.
Stephen: And I'm just sort of flabbergasted that a man who's kind of spent his life teaching compassion and
you know, giving so much to his community.
Stephen: You're so alone at the end, and I just wonder what you make of that.
Stephen: Well, it it seems to go with the territory. You think of Socrates, you think of Jesus. They all end up basically being killed.
Stephen: And
Stephen: the problem with someone like Gautima or someone like Socrates, or someone like Jesus is, that is that they basically are perceived as a threat to establish structures of power.
Stephen: They're not. They're not comfortable kind of people.
Stephen: and you know they they buck the trend. they tread their own path. And in in the case of of Gautima. and I think again, the discourses are very clear on this. I mean.
Stephen: we tent in the
Stephen: Buddhism prefers. The kind of legend of Prince Sidata. you know, is is, but that's really. you know, it's a beautiful myth. It has its role.
Stephen: but it's got nothing to do with the historical reality, as we can now understand, and
Stephen: the discourses that have come down to us.
Stephen: Lay out in in quite, you know, quite detail. You have to
Stephen: find the data scattered through lots of text, which is what I spent a fair amount of time doing.
Stephen: But, you get a fairly clear picture of the last year or so of his life as I recount him after Buddhism, but also in confession of a Buddhist atheist. And there you get effectively an account of
Stephen: what I think you can call the passio the Passion of the Buddha a bit like the last. you know, last year of Christ's life. or what you get in the
Stephen: in the in the first 4 books of Plato. You know the the, the the last year or so of Socrates's life.
Stephen: which starts the whole works of Plato, starts with
Stephen: with Socrates
Stephen: being summoned to court.
Stephen: then accused and then tried and then killed.
Stephen: and the Mahab Para, Nibana Suter. the the great discourse on the passing Diganika. 16 recounts in quite some detail
Stephen: the Buddha's last journey. And it's a journey of a person who's basically been being abandoned by his sponsors who either died
Stephen: or turned against him
Stephen: But in terms of these other great paradigmatic figures. This seems to be what happens
Stephen: that the world in reality finds it difficult to accept
Stephen: what essentially are counterintuitive
Stephen: teachings and practices.
Stephen: And my second question is that I'm really concerned about the agricultural workers or the laborers. Does this model mean that they become kind of second-class Buddhist, because they don't actually work. Well, that's a good question. I don't think so. No.
Stephen: clearly not. And I think also, you know, you can find a dignity in labor.
Stephen: I think of a lot of people migrant refugees who who leave behind their homelands and go to places like America and Australia, and often the first generation spend their time just working, you know, unskilled labor.
Stephen: but they're doing it so that they can afford their children and education they can contribute to, you know, their
Stephen: descendants having a better life.
Stephen: And again, I think it would be too much of a caricature to say that this is all drudgery and grind, and so forth, and so on. But
Stephen: one of the experiences that formed me
Stephen: was after I left grammar school.
Stephen: And all I really wanted to do was get out of England as far away as possible.
Stephen: Was. I went to work in an asbestos factory for 6 months as a cleaner.
Stephen: Now they knew it was dangerous, and so they paid you rather well.
Stephen: And but they, you know, you have to wear masks and stuff. But
Stephen: this really opened my eyes to what factory labour was about. And you know I was really, you know, shocked
to me.
Stephen: People perfectly good, nice people
Stephen: who'd spent their whole lives in this factory making asbestos, doing the same repetitive tasks, you know, day after day, month after month, year after year.
Stephen: There's something deadening about all of that. and really no time to really do much else either.
Stephen: Of course there are examples of people who. you know who who work under these conditions and rise above those conditions clearly.
Stephen: and I think you know labor reform, and so forth. That occurs during the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth century trade unions are trying to improve the conditions under which this work is done.
Stephen: But I can't. You know I certainly don't want to romanticize it.
Stephen: working, I mean. Hannah Arendt also struggles with this. and she acknowledges that you, you know a life lived in.
Stephen: let's say, farming. doing daily toil day after day could be. She actually says it can be a life of bliss
Stephen: that you you somehow become part of the natural cycle of like life itself. And it's something very, very rewarding and fulfilling. But it's kind of an end in itself.
Stephen: But I think that's a very good question.
Stephen: It's also occurred to me that
Stephen: the this kind of work is the sort of work
Stephen: that
Stephen: could well be in our in the next decades or so replaced by automation.
Stephen: AI robots a lot of this kind of repetitive work. It doesn't need to be done by human beings
Stephen: less and less. and that might be from some respects, one of the one of the positive sides of these technological developments. It can free people up
Stephen: from doing such work
Stephen: because they haven't any choice very often, that's all that's available to them. Not that they like it
Stephen: to enable them to have lives that are not tied to these
Stephen: repetitive activities.
Stephen: We also have someone online. So and Jeff here.
Stephen: if I could just comment on on the last.
Stephen: if we look at some of the research in the health data.
Stephen: it's probably not so much
Stephen: the type of activity that people are involved with is not whether you're a farmer or whatever.
Stephen: But the level of autonomy
Stephen: and responsibility that one can carry
Stephen: in those tasks in the scope. One has 4,
Stephen: and.
Stephen: you know, bringing something to it rather than just kind of carrying out something that's been imposed on you. That's simply a comment. There.
Stephen: no, thank you. I think that's that's a good point.
Stephen: Yeah, I think what I'm what what struck me when I worked in that factory was that these people didn't really have a choice. They were kind of. you know, this was all that they could do to earn
Stephen: the amount of money they needed to feed their family, etc. Etc.
Stephen: And and some of these men I got to know again saw this work as something that kind of, and enable their children to get an education that's very often is that
Stephen: their rationale for it.
Stephen: and they would go to church. Perhaps they would have you know, they have moral values. They weren't just sort of animal laborands, as Hannah Arang calls it.
Stephen: You know they were good people.
Stephen: and but they weren't probably even by their own admission, maybe leading very fulfilling lives.
Stephen: We have someone in the house of 6, the house of 6. If you can say your name first. You're on now.
Meg: Jan. Jan. Hello! Thank you very much, Stephen. That was very it. It felt very important to make that differentiation between, as you say, work and labor
Meg: and I'm I may be extrapolating, but I would be interested on in your comments.
Meg: and that extrapolation is that work, as you define.
Meg: is effectively culture building or city building.
Meg: because it takes
Meg: what is to something new.
Stephen: whereas labor, as you described by by its by its definition, is
Meg: repetitive, you know, is repetitive. And II just would make a comment that
Meg: I also think that there's there's a big differentiation between labour and
Meg: and and most have. I mean, I'm sure many of us have worked at labor jobs. and
Meg: there many of them are not without their creative sides, and many of them are not without their skills.
Meg: And there's a I can't remember, there's a feminist book, a woman who worked for $5 a day in the States, and
Meg: you know she worked as a cleaner, and decided that it was exceedingly hard, and she needed to be exceedingly on task in order to to achieve it. So it's, you know, in a way it's not. That's A, that's aside. My real thing is comments about
Meg: work as building culture and even maybe building the city.
Stephen: Thank you.
Stephen: Thank you. Yeah. Kate has got a hand.
Stephen: Thank you. Just following on from that. The other thing about
Stephen: about work is that there's satisfaction in being connected connected in the workplace. So having
Stephen: some jobs.
Stephen: Disappear.
Stephen: A lot of people who are liberated from work are not necessarily fulfilled because of their missing connection.
Stephen: From labor. Sorry? Yeah. So it doesn't necessarily translate into having a rich and fulfilling life. There are many other causes and conditions that permit the flourishing.
Stephen: No, that's true. And I remember, in the Thatcher years following the miners strike. and there was a part of me that thought, why are these people fighting to be able to spend their time underground, digging out coal.
Stephen: But it became quite clear, when I listened to their point of view. that what that work gave them was a profound sense of community.
Stephen: a sense that you know that they were working together under hardship, but in doing so, somehow transcending that hardship
Stephen: through their labor, if you wish, so I don't. I think it's dangerous, and I think Irene perhaps slips into this too a bit. Is that you make somewhat too much of a binary distinction between the 2. And again, we need to recollect that survival. Let's say, labor is also part of the eightfold path.
Stephen: It's not as though that's to be sort of eliminated. I think the fact that
Stephen: Buddha listed it on a par with the way we see. You know both our perspective, imagination
Stephen: work and so on. Survival is part of it. It is an integral part of the path. and that I perhaps did not
Stephen: emphasize enough. But
Stephen: I think what I was trying to share in this talk was really about restoring an understanding of work
Stephen: which simply doesn't exist in traditional Buddhism. And that might have because I contrasted that, following a rent
Stephen: with labour. I probably presented an overly negative picture of labour.
Stephen: But but yeah, I agree. I think we do need also to recover.
Stephen: you know, a much more complex sense of these different human activities, all of which can be meaningful and valuable and and given people's, you know inclinations and proclivities they will find themselves in, you know, drawn to maybe the simplicity of that kind of work.
Stephen: but yeah, I struggle with it a bit, and I can't imagine there's anybody here who is an unskilled laborer
or would want to be.
Stephen: Am I right wrong? Suspect we all have.
Stephen: if you had, yeah, if we had to be, we would, of course.
Stephen: Okay, I just here
Stephen: Ola here. So
Stephen: I'm struggling a bit with the concept of survival versus work, because the way I understand it, and hopefully you can help me clarify. This
Stephen: is that
Stephen: is actually work, which is your chapter starts with. It's in
Stephen: unnatural to humans and existence. Sorry, unnatural, yeah, to human existence.
Stephen: Ultimately it is work that causes to the destruction of this planet. So if we were all in a state of survival and just producing
Stephen: exactly what we need to survive to the next day.
Stephen: We wouldn't be here debating about the problem how the world is distracted. Right? Yeah. So at the same time as human beings as we're evolving, we want to do something meaningful and satisfactory.
Stephen: So why is this balance weighs this middle way when we're still engaged in something that
Stephen: you know lets us flourish, and at the same time we don't contribute to the destruction of the world
Stephen: if it makes sense. Yes, that that is precisely the nub of the question. Yeah.
Stephen: but it's also part of the eightfold path work. Yeah, but work and survival. And this is what's
Stephen: see. This is what I'm grappling with
Stephen: the fact that they're both there.
Stephen: And whereas traditionally, Buddhism is just treated. Ardiva livelihood.
Stephen: you know it has. It is. It doesn't acknowledge that distinction.
Stephen: a very interesting book I've read recently is called A New dawn of everything by 2 writers, David Graeber and David Wainrow. One is an economist, the other is an archaeology, an anthropologist.
Stephen: and it revisits through. It goes back to look at pre-modern prehistorical cultures through by basically archaeological evidence. And you know the the work that's being done by anthropologists to reconstruct the kind of societies that these prehistoric cultures
Stephen: lived. and they turn out to be a lot more complex. And I'm sure this is also the
Stephen: true. What you would
Stephen: now understand the life of the aborigines also to mean it wasn't just, you know, people running around grunt, grunting and scraping and eating termites and stuff which is the sort of colonial caricature of these things, but the colonial mindset, and also, I think.
Stephen: the the mindset of of the whole. Yeah, from the whole beginning of the colonial period is to dismiss people who lived in pre-modern times or prehistorical times, as basically brutal savages.
Stephen: But go and look at the paintings on the walls of Laska.
Stephen: These are not done by moodle savages. These are extraordinarily accomplished works of art.
Stephen: and so, even 40,000 years ago.
Stephen: human beings were living clearly in in sophisticated communities.
Stephen: They were engaging in high degrees of artistic work. We don't know what they were talking about. We don't. There's no record. And if we you know, the problem is a very, this is almost a cliche.
Stephen: The the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. Just because you don't have any evidence for what the painters at last go were doing in their spare time. That doesn't mean that they were just doing nothing.
Stephen: just lying around twiddling their thumbs.
Stephen: and the book by graver and Wengra
Stephen: explores a number of archaeological
Stephen: excavations in the Americas in Central Middle East different parts of the world that reveal that the
Stephen: there was a high degree of differentiation between these different communities, even those which were neighboring each other. They had very different arrangements, very different artifacts there was high, you know, people have. The reality is. And when I look at these caves at Lascaux.
Stephen: in France, near where I live. You recognise in these works that these were people just like you and me.
Stephen: They weren't more stupid. They weren't less imaginative. They were just as sensitive as we are. and it's very difficult being conditioned by the colonial mindset to allow those kinds of perceptions to come in.
Stephen: So I think the difference between work and label
Stephen: as something that would go right back to those times, too. there were cultures. There were civilizations
Stephen: that came and went, came and went, came and went, and we've lost all track of them.
Stephen: So yeah, if you're interested. And I. So I was recommended
Stephen: a couple of books, a book called Dark emu, which maybe some of you have read. I
Stephen: haven't read it, but it seems that that's another study that
Stephen: brings out the you know the you know, the the sophistication, the sensitivity.
Stephen: the complexity of these prehistoric cultures.
Stephen: It's called a new dawn of everything.
Stephen: a new dawn of everything it's available in paperback. Now
Stephen: can we check? Who wants to share in the room? Because we have 4 online who want to do that as well? Can we have a show of hand of who actually wants to share or ask a question? 1, 2, 3 people. We have some online. Which way do you want to go? Stephen?
Stephen: Item, and let's go online. Okay, Leanne, you're you're on.
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): Hello again. Yes, very interesting conversation. First, a number of points have arisen with regards to everyone's contribution.
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): So you mentioned the other day, Stephen, about the type of right of passage or apprenticeship
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): that you would like young people to be involved with, remember about monastic life. So
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): I see that
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): doing that those sort of what you've classified as laborious type
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): activities could be part of that apprenticeship. I myself am an Allied health professional. So I've I've been in and out of the system for 40 years.
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): and I sort of to this day still think that doctors should start off by emptying bedpans.
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): And with regards to the Japanese culture, I read somewhere. It was very interesting that the the architects in in in Japan start off their apprenticeship with regards to being in the forest and relating to the elements, and then
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): are getting a feel for the the, for the wood, for for instance, and then starting to shape, and the wood like that. Many of the metaphors that are used in in the Buddha's discourses.
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): So
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): I also. What's arisen
is that I don't see such a strict
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): a distinction between what you're calling work and labor or work and survival.
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): I see that work is a type of perhaps your calling in life, and it's involved with or it's related to finding one's voice and that authenticity. But in the meantime, yes, as you've said, we all need to survive.
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): and I had a little giggle when someone in the the room sort of said, we're talking about food. It's like, Well, who do you think is going to produce all the food for you, lot out there?
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): You know it's what a privilege not to be able to have to toil the land. But you can go to your market or your supermarket, or your co-OP, or wherever you're purchasing food, and it's all there ready for you. So
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): I think once again, like you, you gave the example of working in the asbestos factory as a young man. Perhaps throughout life we can see that all of these different
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): tasks and activities that are involved in us being able to live.
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): The the responsibility of all, and at different times in our life we can experience those things.
and then, especially when we're young and we have the energy and the strength and the enthusiasm.
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): With regards to that, the use of our bodies
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): that we can engage in those activities, and then, of course, move on as the younger generations come through to to
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): to replace that
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): also. When you said about the mechanical, you know, developing robots. You know the artificial intelligence?
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): Yeah, I think we have to see the balance in all of that as well. And and you know, what type of farming are we doing? Is it organic, biodynamic, regenerative farming which is very different to agribusiness, as most of us are aware of, which, of course, is utilising a lot of those things that you've suggested.
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): could replace the the labor.
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): whereas the former
requires
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): different forms of labor. I do a lot of weeding. I don't see it as laborious. I see it as an incredible practice of presence.
Of awareness of doing some yoga, some chigum in a functional way which is actually achieving something. So thanks for all of that.
Stephen: Thank you, Leanne. Now I think I hear a lot of
Stephen: echoes of agreement in in in this room here with with that, and it's true. I I mean, I've
Stephen: I trained in a monastery in Korea
Stephen: and in Zen Buddhism. The monks work. We, I mean, not as much as they might have. We didn't have to do as much as perhaps
Stephen: labour. Yeah.
Stephen: Well, whatever the we had to. You know we had to go out into the field, you know, in the middle of you know, we had to go out to the fields. We had to weed the soybean crops. We had to make the kimchi if if the river was! We had a heavy storm, and the river got silted up. We had to make chain gangs with buckets to enter the river.
Stephen: and these are an integral part of the practice. Absolutely.
Stephen: They weren't exactly fun, but I didn't dislike them. In fact, sometimes it was rather nice getting out of the meditation hall and
Stephen: and scrabbling around in the dirt.
Stephen: and there's a famous citation from Baijan. It says, A day without
Stephen: work. Slash labour is a day without food.
Stephen: In other words, you must be acutely conscious that every grain of rice you eat is the result of someone's labor, and there's a strict rule in the monastery that you cannot leave a single grain of rice uneaten in your bowl.
Stephen: And that's some practice. Martin and I followed to this day.
Stephen: So yeah, I agree with you. I think that that sort of training. And this hypothetical monastic university that I'm dreaming up.
Stephen: it would include that
Stephen: would include definitely getting your hands dirty.
Stephen: getting in touch with the soil. because that's also a part of our going back to what you were saying, Andy, about reconnecting with the earth as well. But there is a big difference, as you say, between agribusiness, which is just machinery.
Stephen: and the sort of gardening and farm farm work that many of my friends participate in, which is permaculture, and and so forth. And so, which is which is a very different
Stephen: kind of activity. It's it's more like work than labor, really.
Stephen: there's a highly. There's a clear understanding of your relationship with the crops and exactly how you can best produce them. It's a skill. It's a highly refined skill. It's based on a scientific understanding of how we enter. You know how the plants grow and
Stephen: can flourish, and so forth, and so on. At that point.
Stephen: you know, it ceases to become mindless labour. It's not mindless labour at all. And it's also interesting. In the metaphor, in the parable, the metaphor the Buddha uses about.
Stephen: Cultivating himself, he says, like a farmer irrigating the field
Stephen: right? He doesn't exclude the farm like an Fletcher fashioning an arrow like a carpenter
Stephen: shaping a piece of wood, so farming is included.
Stephen: He's not dismissing.
Stephen: He's recognizing it, too, as a skill in the transformation of the soil and the land. and the you know the
Stephen: understanding of of growing crops in a skillful, healthy, sustainable way.
Stephen: So yeah, we remind you.
Stephen: Hello.
Stephen: Oh, sorry. I'm just gonna
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): I was gonna say, just one last comment at with regards to autonomy
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): that someone in your your room there brought up. Yes, it's so. That is such a deciding factor in all of this.
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): and you know, during the course of my vocation I have worked in workplace rehabilitation, and one of the a lot of the research in the early days when, before this big transition in that area
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): was a
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): with regards to powerlessness in the work place, and they were able to clearly show that if someone didn't, did feel that sense of powerlessness and they had no autonomy.
Then
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): their workplace injury, recovery was doomed. Really
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): to be quite frank. So yes, I think that's a really magic ingredient. Is this thing of autonomy rather than feeling like a slave?
Stephen: Exactly. No, I think that's a very important point.
Stephen: So how about we go to Gowan on on here? And then Suzanne online after that. thank you. And this picks up a little bit on that that last comment.
Stephen: think this is a really difficult area, and there's a couple of things which make it difficult. One is we don't actually know how people feel about their work on the whole. So it's great for us to talk about what it's like being a farmer or someone in a factory, or whatever we need far greater understanding, and they need to be speaking for themselves about what is what
Stephen: you might think that the criterion should be what leads to human flourishing, because, after all, that's our foundation. And it seems to me there's I mean, from what we know and what people are trying to do with workplace design.
Stephen: Some of the things that relate to flourishing are the nature of the task, so is it sweeping up asbestos, or is it painting? On a vase or something like that?
Second, the way the work is organized.
Stephen: and
Stephen: a lot of the problems that arise at the moment is that work is organized around the needs of the machine, not the needs of the people. The third one is
Stephen: the sociality in the workplace for a lot of people. In fact, work is
Stephen: a place where they grow, have their society. The people they work with are perhaps people they're closest to. And so that's another important thing. And the last one is the sense of making a contribution. What we do matters. And I remember hearing about workers in a particular atomic bomb factory in America, being very proud because they made the best atomic bombs in America.
Stephen: So I would suggest that it's much less about the type of work we're doing, the sort of thing we're doing. It's very much more about the organization of it.
Stephen: And that's something which shifts very, very quickly and has shifted very quickly since you or I were in a factory. Yeah.
Stephen: if you or I were working in Amazon now, it would be a very, very different experience.
Stephen: So what I would suggest with this is not getting so caught up about the distinction, but thinking that the root is
Stephen: what leads to the flourishing of this human being. We've got a fair understanding of some of the things that contribute to that flourishing through work.
Stephen: and it's much less about moving from blue collar to white collar, and much more about having work that is built around the needs and aspirations of people who are doing it
Stephen: as well as the economic needs of whatever entity they are working within.
Stephen: So that was just, I'm completely on message. With all of that it's very helpful.
Stephen: It's very helpful. II hope Winton this afternoon will will also shed some further light on this and of course you know II speak from very little experience, and an old experience, too. We don't have asbestos factories anymore.
Stephen: for example, that that doesn't exist.
Stephen: so yeah, I agree with you. I don't think it is about making those rather crude distinctions between blue collar, white collar, and I don't think I was really trying to say that, but I do think it's helpful to make a differentiation between even
Stephen: in our own. You know our lives, my life, for example, I can differentiate between things I have to do that I don't really want to do, but have to do to survive. There's all kinds of tedious things that we all have to get done.
Stephen: and I try to do that with a degree of of mindfulness and awareness, and not getting stressed about it and all the other skills. And
Stephen: and sometimes I succeed, sometimes I don't.
Stephen: And so it might be helpful to also to think of that in terms of each of us we have things
Stephen: we have to labour to do certain things, and
Stephen: we also cherish very much what we consider to be our real vocation. And and and and you know, work
Stephen: that is fulfilling and meaningful for us. And I can see that in myself.
Stephen: what was I gonna say? Yeah. And I agree with you. I think the key is flourishing. I think that's the key. And so yeah, of course, there'll be people who flourish in
Stephen: very what I would consider to be a you know. Not particularly interesting thing to do. But that's not.
Stephen: That's my problem.
Stephen: Not that clearly, you know. I know people. I lived on a farm in England
Stephen: for some years, when we came back from Asia.
Stephen: and got to know some of the farmers with the cows, and with the so forth, and so on, and and they they led lives that were very fulfilling and meaningful for them.
Stephen: Often they had some kind of philosophy as well. 1 one iron was, and a follower of biodynamic, steiner-based farming.
Stephen: And so his farming was deeply built into a whole spiritual sense of you know his, his, his understanding of the world. So thank you.
Stephen: Okay, shall we go? We've got 3 people in house and 3 online. So maybe we just alternate till the time runs out. We go to Suzanne. You're on now.
Meg: Thank you. And I love that. I want to say. I love that. There's such an emphasis. in your
Meg: interpretation reading of the eightfold Path. There's such an emphasis on on work because it I think it's very often
Meg: sort of left left by the side of the
Meg: of the of the bathroom, and lots of
Meg: a areas of activities or social movements, let alone ways of seeing the world. 2 things, Steven. One was that when I earlier first version, I'll heard you give of this
Meg: sequence of the I eightfold path when you came to survival what I heard. Anyway, I have misheard. But was that you were emphasizing survival in a more a global way?
Meg: As you know, as a way of, in a sense reaching to the questions of all the environmental issues of all the big big issues that we've been touching on throughout, and that we use the term we use that facet survival in order to reference all of those issues.
Meg: So there, there's that. And II would love to hear. Why, how you shifted to this other version.
Meg: or seems to me, anyway, and secondly, when we speak of work, there's there's that huge area of work that large proportion of women particularly, are involved in. And sometimes it's called domestic work.
Meg: and sometimes it's called domestic labor
Meg: and it's and it's it's an interesting mix it feels to me of the the 2 in interpretations you've been giving this morning of labor and work
Meg: a lot. A lot of house work. Is is laborious. A lot of it is creative.
Meg: And I wanted to say, too, to add to all of that there is a huge amount of research and knowledge, even though often not pay attention to in certain quarters. But there's a huge amount of research and and knowledge and understanding
Meg: on the people's experience of work, history of work, practices of work and labor. And
Meg: one of the important things about that is that also those organizations involved, such as trade unions have got both, you know, global knowledge as well as immediate
Meg: indirect knowledge, direct, sorry, direct, experiential knowledge
Meg: that is not dated either. So it's worth sort of just remembering that those are. Those are available to us. We don't have to only rely on our own
Meg: Quite singular experiences to get a group on on meaning of work. But I'd love to hear how your response to the notion of survival is that larger issue and and also to keep on the table the notion of the domestic as I size of
Meg: labor and work.
Stephen: Thanks. Thank you very much.
Stephen: What you're referring to is a course I gave.
Stephen: I can't remember now, probably a couple of years ago, when I was still
Stephen: work muddling through this stuff, and for a long time on my chart.
Stephen: my cartography of care. as you correctly remember.
Stephen: I put survival as the eighth, Steph.
Stephen: not the
Stephen: sixth.
Stephen: I put it at the end of the of the of the list. In other words, I was thinking very much in terms of survival in terms of the survival of life on earth
Stephen: in that big
Stephen: right. That's true.
Stephen: I think the reason I changed that
Stephen: is twofold one. I was influenced by the thinking of Hannah Arendt.
Stephen: and as I've acknowledged, it's her basic her book, the human condition that has set the template for this sequencing.
Stephen: and. as we'll see tomorrow.
Stephen: wanted to end really on this idea of voice which Hannah Arendt calls action. It's a bit strange, she calls it action, and then she says, Well, actually, what I mean by that is
Stephen: is almost invariably saying something. as we'll see tomorrow. And that then Rec. Made me recognize that voice is really what
Stephen: for me, in a way, is
Stephen: kind of culmination of everything I do is what I say in the broadest sense how I desp
Stephen: display myself in the world. The message I put out that's kind of
Stephen: in terms of my practice, what
Stephen: it comes down to. But I think we also need to go back to the metaphor of the chicken and the eggs. There is no fixed sequence in the end.
Stephen: It's it's for all of us to somehow balance this out in a way where we're getting an we're getting equal warmth, and
Stephen: we're not excluding some to the
Stephen: cost of others, that all the eggs can hatch
Stephen: roughly around the same time.
Stephen: so any sequencing will be to some extent arbitrary.
Stephen: But at the same time I want a sequencing that will somehow speak to the condition of our times. That's what I'm struggling to.
Stephen: But she
Stephen: and who knows? After this discussion.
Stephen: this retreat, I might change it all again. I don't know. I don't think so. but There's no reason why not.
Stephen: so don't see this as set in stone.
Stephen: It's actually past the half hour, so maybe we could bring it to a close here.
Stephen: Thank you very much for your
reflections. It's been very, very helpful.
Stephen: This is not my area of expertise. as you can probably see. And
Stephen: you know, this has given me a lot of food for thought.
Stephen: and it'll probably find its way into into the book.
Stephen: That doesn't mean you get royalties around.
Stephen: a lot of her names.